Three years ago, in 2014, Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde started thinking about the glow-in-the-dark stars that parents stick to the walls and ceilings of children's bedrooms. "I thought, 'Wow, this is actually quite an amazing material. Very magical,'" he says. "It is energy-neutral and uses sunlight to recharge. So we started to look at it. And the thing is, it is also pretty disgusting and only works for 30 minutes. There had been no innovation in it for 25 years. So we made it safer, brighter and more durable."

Roosegaarde started thinking about how photo-luminescent material might be used in infrastructure, cutting down on light pollution and energy use. His studio started to work with the Dutch construction company Heijmans on light-emitting paint. Then Roosegaarde got a call from the Van Gogh Europe Foundation, which in 2015 was looking for permanent ways to mark the 125th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's death. Crucially, it had money to spend. The request was a gift for Roosegaarde; it dovetailed with his thinking. Here was the chance to attach an idea to a story and get it into a public space.

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Between 1883 and 1885, van Gogh lived and worked in Nuenen, near Eindhoven. There was little there to mark his connection to the town, apart from the 335-kilometre van Gogh cycle route, which offered cyclists a two-wheeled tour of significant locations (at least those outside of Paris and Provence). Roosegaarde and Heijmans suggested repaving a one-kilometre section of the path near Nuenen. They would dot it with photoluminescent pebbles, supplemented by a judicious sprinkling of solar-powered LEDs (for those days when the Dutch Sun had not provided enough luminescent oomph). The pebbles were laid out in the vigorous swirls of van Gogh's Starry Night. When the Van Gogh-Roosegaarde cycle path - for a man who hasn't yet reached 40, Roosegaarde is keenly aware of the artist's legacy - opened in November 2014, it attracted positive coverage from the international press.

The path hit a good-news sweet spot which, of course, it was carefully engineered to do. The project was designed to create momentum. Since then, there have been enquiries from Dubai, China and Turkey about installing longer sections of photoluminescent cycle paths. The path was also featured in the Dutch children's book, Stoere Steffie op bezoek bij van Gogh. Roosegaarde and Heijmans continue to experiment and test ideas for energy-efficient infrastructure. In 2014, a pilot project was initiated to create a 500-metre stretch of road near Oss in the Netherlands, flanked by luminescent lines. The road is part of a smart-highway collaboration with Roosegaarde's studio.

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The cycle path, like many of Roosegaarde's designs, uses enhanced analogue technology. The 37-year-old designer often employs technology that was once seen as a plaything, but which has now been appropriated and updated to create wonder. His designs are speculations, prototypes and provocations. They sit somewhere between public art and suggestions for new sorts of infrastructure. To work, they must mix pragmatism and poetry, generate enthusiasm, become an open-source lure for other ideas and agitate for policy change. "On the one hand, they are design or art pieces, or whatever you want to call them," Roosegaarde explains. "On the other, they are prototypes for the city of tomorrow or landscape of tomorrow. A manifestation of the future within the now. I want them to become part of a new default, a new reality."

Roosegaarde (second left) works with his Dream Factory colleagues on a model of Gates of Light, which will light up the Afsluitdijk motorway

Maarten de Groot

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The son of a maths teacher, Roosegaarde studied fine art before taking a masters in architecture at the Berlage Institute (now part of the Delft University of Technology). While studying, he worked as an adviser at Rem Koolhaas's OMA and collaborated with star architecture firm MVRDV on the book KM3: Excursions On Capacity. Roosegaarde established his own studio in 2007, with the aim of developing technology-driven social design. "It was just me and I did everything," he says. He now has a team of 16, housed in a restored 1930s glass factory, which he calls the Dream Factory, in Rotterdam's Innovation District. Roosegaarde also part-funds a team at Wageningen University and has a studio in Shanghai.

Collaboration with academia and research scientists is central to Roosegaarde's approach. "Daan is absolutely fearless of technology and scale," says Louise Fresco, a specialist in sustainable development and president of the executive board at Wageningen University. "He thinks big across boundaries of engineering and biology. Like all creative people he is impatient and accumulates and reuses knowledge of others." (There was a minor drama in 2016, when a collaborator on another Studio Roosegaarde project, the Smog Free Tower, accused him of claiming full ownership.) In our conversation, though, Roosegaarde emphasises that his projects are collaborative.

The Van Gogh-Roosegaarde cycle path's surface is coated with glowing paint and powered using energy gathered during the day

Maarten de Groot

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One of the studio's first projects was a sustainable, self-powering, sprung-disco-light dance floor installed at Rotterdam's Club WATT in 2008. The floor's springs converted dancers' movement into electricity. In 2014, the studio worked with scientists at Leiden University to create a 25m-by-25m rainbow at Amsterdam's Central Station. Rainbow Station, as it was called, used a custom light source with a liquid-crystal filter. It was developed by the university for use in the study of planets around other suns. Station passengers were treated to the rainbow display throughout 2015, if only for a brief moment after sunset.

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Frans Snik, an astronomer based at Leiden, helped develop Rainbow Station. "I am used to slightly crazy projects," he says, "but creating a true-colour rainbow in a way that was deemed impossible is still a highlight. The word 'impossible' is just not in Roosegaarde's dictionary. Through unexpected collaboration he turns dreams into reality." Snik and his colleagues are using the liquid-crystal technology to look for signs of habitable conditions on other planets - which includes rainbows. "Rainbow Station was not just a symbol of beauty and peace, but also of scientific discovery," Snik adds.

With Waterlicht Roosegaarde used LEDs to conjure an on-demand Aurora Borealis, covering 1.6 hectares of Amsterdam, and then Paris, in mesmerising waves of light. In Amsterdam, the display was calibrated to simulate the water levels of a Netherlands not defended by its systems of dykes and dams. In Paris, the message was more complex. It was a warning about rising sea levels, but also a prompt to get visitors thinking about harnessing the energy of the oceans. The Paris display attracted 50,000 visitors.

"We are restoring history... and at the same time, giving it something future-proof."Daan Roosegaarde

"Waterlicht is mind-bendingly beautiful," says Yves Béhar, the San Francisco-based entrepreneur and founder of design firm fuseproject. "Designers can choreograph the world to make a statement or tell a story. The air, the wind and the Earth are Roosegaarde's canvas."

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Another Roosegaarde project, Windlicht, connected wind turbines at the Eneco offshore wind farm in Zeeland with green lasers. It aimed to give green energy an enchanting charge, while acknowledging that the country's first windmills were seen as monstrous, before becoming national emblems.

Wim Pijbes is the former emeritus general director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which hosted a number of Roosegaarde's design provocations, including Waterlicht. "Daan is really an engaged designer; he makes us aware of the world we live in," he says. "The word designer doesn't really cover what he does. I don't want to compare him to Leonardo but he could be the 'designer universalis'."

Roosegaarde sees himself as less Renaissance man, more part of a longstanding tradition and a distinctively Dutch aspiration: the mastering and manufacturing of the landscape. His work seeks to celebrate that mastery in art. "The Netherlands is mostly below sea level, so without technology and creative thinking we would drown," he explains. "We invented this system of dams, dykes and windmills. The Dutch masters painted this landscape - they thought it was beautiful. And I definitely feel like an extension of that tradition, in making landscape art and architecture."

In 2016, Roosegaarde installed Beyond, the world's largest and most complex lenticular, at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. The piece is an immersive cloudscape inspired by the Dutch masters. Its cloud wall is more than 110 metres long and 10cm thick, and features 60 images behind each lens. Roosegaarde is now working with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment on the restoration of the Afsluitdijk. This is a 32-kilometre stretch of dyke, including 60 lock complexes and towers, completed in 1932 and topped with a four-lane motorway. Roosegaarde plans to paint the towers with the retroreflective coating his studio has developed, which is made up of tiny lenses. The coating ensures street lighting can be removed and that drivers will see only their headlights reflected off the towers. "We are restoring history," Roosegaarde explains, "and at the same time, giving it something future-proof."

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The artist is obsessed by the potential of these sorts of public spaces, with "making places where people feel connected, away from the bloody computer screen". To use a classic formulation of what a designer does, Roosegaarde is an advocate for problem-solving in the material world. "Like Madonna said, we're living in a material world. We should listen to Madonna," he adds. He isn't keen on smartphones, screens or the digital toolbox beneath. "You mention apps in this studio and you are fucking fired," he only half-jokes. "Don't you think it's weird that we're creating a world where we are feeding our dreams into this virtual cloud - Twitter, Facebook, Weibo, WeChat - and the physical world is crashing?"

He advocates moving technology from behind the screen and into reality, where it might serve a more practical, positive purpose. "I am very interested in what happens when technology jumps out of the screen and becomes part of the clothes we wear, the space we inhabit," he says. "You can call it the smart city or the internet of things or whatever, but let's get beyond buzzwords and start incorporating this smartness into the physical world."

This faith in technology when properly applied encourages something in him that verges on despair at peers who try to address design problems that were solved millennia ago. "There is a lack of curiosity about the future within the design discipline," he says. "I am tired of it and I don't believe in it any more. There is no hope there."

Tall and tireless, Roosegaarde often slips into the soundbites and aphorisms of an expert public speaker. Roosegaarde is nothing if not an optimist. He is also, ironically, an expert seeder of social-media activity and activism, a contradiction but also an inevitable one, given the scale of his ambition.

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The energy-producing dance floor at Rotterdam's Club WATT, described as the world's first sustainable nightclub

Maarten de Groot

In 2013, Roosegaarde was in Beijing, watching the skies. "On Saturday it was clear. By Wednesday, the city was covered in smog," he says. "And I thought , 'Technology is killing us'. I became inspired by Beijing fog." He started to think about static electricity and static attraction. "I thought about how I might use that principle to build the largest smog vacuum cleaner, which sucks up polluted air, cleans it and releases it. That is how you change things, with a proposal and not just another opinion."

He developed and tested a prototype in Rotterdam. At the same time, he started to talk about the project to see if there were others who could inform his thinking. "We got hundreds of emails from artists, scientists and designers from all over the world. We had this British girl from the Royal College of Art, who was making clothes that change colour when smog levels get too high. And there was also a Taiwanese designer - and this is an idea that we are really developing - who made a bicycle that sucks up pollution as it goes along, cleans it up and recycles the air.

"There was this girl making a wearable greenhouse. Some of these suggestions are incredibly smart, some are functional and some are more symbolic. But these are people who consider themselves makers. They are not consumers. They are trying to use new technology and creative thinking to improve their lives. And they are not waiting for permission; they are just doing it."

Roosegaarde pictured in front of a copy of his art installation Beyond, which is displayed at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol

Maarten de Groot

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These are the people who fuel Roosegaarde's optimism and mission - the creatives, technologists and tinkerers who keep plugging away at finding real solutions to real problems. They are his people. He is, though, at the advance guard, talking to governments and billion-pound contractors. He also knows how fragile good ideas are when they get this close to power and money. "I am an infiltrator," he says. "Of course, you have to deal with ego, ambition and budgets. But it's about having that taste in your mouth and saying: 'How do I get that? How do I get there?' I will be whatever the fuck I need to be to make it happen."

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Roosegaarde began working on the Smog Free Project in 2013. His experiments began at a modest scale: based indoors, he attempted to clear a room full of smog. By September 2015, things had scaled up considerably, and he unveiled the first Smog Free Tower outside Roosegaarde's studio headquarters in Rotterdam.

The seven-metre-tall tower is skinned in moveable metal louvres. It acts as a refined, enlarged version of the air purifiers found in hospitals, sucking in air at the point where copper-coils create an electrostatic field that attracts smog particles. Clean air - or at least 55 per cent cleaner air - is then pumped out. Roosegaarde says the tower cleans 30,000m3 of air per hour.

Studio Roosegaarde's Dream Factory building is a restored 1930s glass factory in Rotterdam's Innovation District

Maarten de Groot

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Building and fine-tuning this kind of technology doesn't come cheap, however. Roosegaarde used a Kickstarter campaign to raise €113,000 (£96,000) to help fund the tower's construction. He came up with the idea of setting crushed smog particles in rings. He put 1,000m3 worth of smog in each one and began selling them for €250 each. The idea soon caught on and there are now YouTube videos of people getting married with Smog Free rings. Prince Charles has a pair of Smog Free cufflinks. Roosegaarde had already been talking to China's Ministry of Environmental Protection about his work and in September 2016, a Smog Free Tower was installed in a Beijing park. This year, it will be toured across four Chinese cities. "This could never have happened five years ago," Roosegaarde explains. "The Chinese government initially denied that it was even smog in Beijing. They said it was sand dust or fog. But now the government has launched a war on smog. It is great to be part of that."

"I am an infiltrator... Of course, you have to deal with ego, ambition and budgets. But it's about having that taste in your mouth and saying: 'How do I get that? How do I get there?' I will be whatever the fuck I need to be to make it happen."Daan Roosegaarde

Roosegaarde understands the limits of the tower and its technology. The effect of one tower is almost entirely symbolic. Its small pool of clean air is a catalytic contrast to the air quality around it. "Is one tower the solution for an entire city? Of course not," he says. "But by making a place where you can see the difference and share it, that's a way to move forward, step-by-step. The government does the top-down stuff: green energy, infrastructure. People like me are coming from the bottom up. Ideas are fragile. There's always opposition. People say [the Smog Free Tower] uses electricity. That the air that comes out is only 55 per cent clean. They're right, I know that. But so what? Are we just going to do nothing? Are we going to offer opinions or proposals? I'm not saying I'm right about everything. I know I'm not. I just want to test the thing, make mistakes and evolve. That for me is the role of design and innovation. To improve things. And, by the way, the next version of the tower will be solar-powered."

Roosegaarde's Lotus, on display at a church in Lille. Visitors were encouraged to interact with the heat-responsive artwork

Maarten de Groot

Early in 2017, Roosegaarde flew to Delhi, which is also keen to install a tower. He's constantly travelling, talking, lobbying, enlisting, wheeling and dealing, pushing and pleading. "There is this Dutch word, schoonheid, which means beauty," Roosegaarde explains. "It means looking at a painting and seeing something that adds a new dimension to your brain. But it also means purity; clean water, clean air, clean energy. So we are pushing for schoonheid to become a human right. We've had two meetings with the UN and they haven't said no yet."

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Meanwhile, the studio carries on refining existing ideas and seeding new ones. In the cavernous workspace, there's a tiny version of his Lotus piece. The original, two-metre-tall Buckminster Fuller-ish dome covered in ultra-light polyester foil flowers has been touring the world since 2012. Inside the dome is a light that tracks anyone who walks past. The light heats up the foil flowers, which unfurl. The smaller version in Roosegaarde's studio reacts to body heat, making it seem alive. Roosegaarde is fascinated with this sort of biomimicry; designs that learn from nature. "We are trying to make things move without electronics or mechanisms," he explains. "We are looking at using this on the façades of buildings, so that when the Sun hits them they open or close. It's a kind of techno-poetry."

Roosegaarde is also working on designs that don't just imitate nature, but actually use it. In a darkened area of his studio, luminescent algae is being tended. Roosegaarde hands me a clear plastic container filled with water and tells me to shake it. Suddenly it is alive with swirling, swishing light. "We are trying to get to know them," Roosegaarde says. "Ultimately, what we'd like to do is create huge, dark spaces filled with these things and when you walk through, the space lights up. It would be a poetic experience. A way to show the beauty of nature but also to say that maybe this is a potential solution for public lighting at night."

The artist has been talking to the US-based molecular biologist Alexander Krichevsky, who has spliced DNA from luminescent marine bacteria similar to that which Roosegaarde is harvesting, with the genome of a houseplant to produce small, glowing domestic flora. In another project, Roosegaarde has started developing energy-generating kites. After becoming convinced that there was a way to attach the kite idea to Afsluitdijk's regeneration, he began collaborating with a creative team at Delft. Roosegaarde and the team are exploring ways to use the kite string's pulling power to generate electricity. Each kite could produce 20 to 100kW of energy," Roosegaarde says. "This is another example of his tricks and tactics; picking an existing idea and taking it somewhere else. His latest project, Space Waste, aims to clear Earth's orbit of space trash and satellite debris. "This is the smog of the Universe," he adds. "Eventually, there will be so much waste, we won't be able to go up any more. We will have trapped ourselves on planet Earth. Insane."

Studio Roosegaarde's head of design works on a sketch on a glass ideas wall reserved for planning future projects

Maarten de Groot

He is aware, however, that there are possible solutions being developed: "Satellites that use nets to capture the debris, or lasers to blast it." He is highly sceptical about Silicon Valley, especially its ethics and economics. "I never go there. For me, it's dead," he says. But in space junk, he sees common purpose and has been in talks with at least one tech giant. "We know there's a market, we just want to add a poetic side. And to speed up the process."

Roosegaarde wants to use the waste and light that travels from space to Earth in new, sustainable ways. This is his next big project, which he will dedicate the next two years to. He also thinks a lot about stars. "I always thought about them as history and information heading at us at incredible speed. That light is communication and information. And we have no real idea what we are looking at," he says.

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A few years ago, Roosegaarde went for his first night dive. He felt lost in the ocean's darkness. "I moved my hand and the water lit up because of the algae. It was like stars," he says. "It was then that I realised light is everywhere, energy is everywhere. I got back on the boat, and I was freezing, but I forgot everything and was like a boy again. That changed me. That's when I thought, 'Let's create physical experiences that change people'. That is how you set a new default."